RESEARCH institutes in Nigeria are not living up to expectations. More so, they should stop equating themselves with civil servants, as they have more onerous tasks at hand than monitoring their hours of work, the Vice Chancellor, Kwara State University (KWASU) Malete, Prof. Abdulrasheed Na'Allah, has said.

Na'Allah told the first Collaborative Research Initiatives Conference (CRIC), organised yesterday by KWASU: "Nigerian research institutions have failed this nation. I just returned from Malaysia a few days ago and what I saw baffled me.

"I visited only a university there and the talk of the town there was the theme of the vision of that country for year 2020. It was the talk of the whole university community in Malaysia that the country must be industrialised by 2020."

Speaking on the theme, "To Search is to Find: Building Research Capacity in Nigerian Universities and other Research Institutions," Na'Allah reminded academics that "university system is not a civil service job.

"As a researcher, you must constantly move around the world to meet people and collaborate with them in the areas of relevant researches. An academic should be a man of ideas who goes around attending conferences."

With the collaboration of like minds, he said, he would turn KWASU into a bastion of research institutions for the benefit of Nigeria and Africa as a whole. Citing the huge number of Professors of Medicine and Pharmacy in Nigeria, he said the developed nations should no longer lead the wars against malaria parasites in Africa.

He warned against lackadaisical attitude to research, noting that HIV/AIDS was never discovered in Africa but pushed into it "when we overslept." He further challenged relevant Nigerian scientists to convert the energy derived from the sun into electricity.